How do I screen contributors in a Subversion pre-commit hook based on folder?

Question

Here's the dilemma:

I have a folder structure:

product/branches/stable product/branches/someotherbranch product/tags product/trunk

I have two users: John and Joe.

I want to prevent Joe from committing to: product/branches/stable and product/tags

What is the pre-commit hook syntax in Perl or Bash or whatever to get the job done?

Answer 1

Why don't you use access limitations? Edit your authz file:

[/product/branches/stable product/]
Joe = r
John = rw

It is much easier and less error prone(eg restructuring your repo layout)

Answer 2

You can also consider integrating your repo with LDAP and use permissions to control access

Answer 3

The pre-commit hook script is called with two arguments that you can use with svnlook to get more details on the transaction about to be performed.

For example, if %1 and %2 are your hook script arguments,

svnlook author %1 -t %2

gives the author, and

svnlook dirs-changed %1 -t %2

gives all the directories involved. There are other commands of course, as you can see in the SVN online book.